The looser the connection
in the sequence of events or the development of the action, the more the
shattered image becomes an allegorical seal. Even from the visual point
of view the sudden evanescent images of the cinema come to resemble a
sort of script. The images are seized but not contemplated. (T. W. Adorno,
‘The schema of mass culture’, 1942) (1)

Talks between
Jean-Luc Godard and the Pompidou Centre began in 2003. The initial proposal
was based on the screening of films over a fairly long period (nine months),
drawing both on cinema history and contemporary production, and organised
around a principle of monthly meetings. The rhythm envisaged at the outset
was that of a week of ‘image gathering’, two weeks of editing, followed
by projection of the resultant film at the Pompidou Centre in the fourth
week. The plan was that this would lead to a sort of series in which each
‘episode’, when completed, would be enriched through its proximity to those
that came before. The event therefore comprised nine monthly meetings to
which visitors to the Centre were to be invited with a view to discovering
a new opus each time.

2. The
Galerie Sud is on Level 1 of the Pompidou Centre. It looks out at street
level over Rue Saint-Merri to the Place Igor Stravinsky.

Regular
correspondence was established with the filmmaker, and this epistolary reflection
lead over time to the principle of an ‘exhibition of cinema’. From the beginning
of 2005, JLG proposed sketches depicting how the 1100 square metre
space of the Galerie Sud of the Pompidou Centre might be occupied.
(2) In the spring and summer of the same year, it became clear to
him that a scale model needed to be built in order to give a better sense
of the potential use of the space. At the beginning of the autumn, a model
of nine rooms was developed, made manually by the filmmaker. Drawing methodologically
on an exploration of memory (whence the notion of archaeology), this model
‘exhibited’ cinematic thought (in cinema ...). It was intended as
the prefiguration of a full-scale scenography, and provided a critical point
of view on the very fact of exhibiting cinema.

3. The Collège
de France, founded in 1530, is a celebrated independent Parisian institution
of higher learning whose faculty, past and present, includes numerous
distinguished scholars in a wide variety of disciplines. Michel Foucault,
Roland Barthes and Pierre Bourdieu, for example, were all professors at
the Collège. Its lectures are open to the public free of charge.

4. Robert Bresson,
Notes on the Cinematograph (Copenhagen: Green Integer, 1997), p.
29. First published in French in 1975.

Following discussion
with the architect-scenographer Nathalie Crinière, financial evaluation
of the project revealed an overrun in relation to the budget set by the
Pompidou Centre for this event. In late January 2006, Jean-Luc Godard
was obliged to return to the drawing board, and to contemplate abandoning
full-size construction of his model. Nevertheless, at the time of writing,
this model remains the heart of the exhibition. Despite any necessary
modifications, the intention is that it be completed in such a way as
to allow it to be experienced as fully as possible, its contents still
spread arborescently through several rooms. These rooms are intended as
the echoes of live thought, or screens irradiated by the effects of such
thought, a significant aspect of which is devoted to an interrogation
of the reproductive act of images.

I do not know today
the final outcome of Jean-Luc Godard’s reflections and decisions. The
lines that follow nevertheless seek to suggest the legitimacy of his project
on the basis of the model that he made. They therefore only address my
interpretation of the initial project on which I worked through correspondence
and in collaboration with the filmmaker over a period of several months.

1 – In the beginning
the project, then called Collage(s) de France, archéologie du
cinéma d’après JLG (‘Collage(s) of France,
archaeology of cinema according to JLG’), comprised nine rooms designed
to be traversed by the visitor in a specific order. Thanks to an overarching
logic of juxtaposition – a montage of images borrowed from art history,
cinema history and the present – close in principle to that of a rebus,
each room invited the visitor to engage in a process of poetic and philosophical
reflection.

A few years ago Jean-Luc
Godard had been keen to deliver a series of lectures at the Collège
de France in which he would have linked the history of cinema to the history
of the twentieth century in a way already central to Histoire(s)
du cinéma (1988-1998). (3) This was not possible.
Can this impossibility be explained today by way of the low esteem in
which cinematic art is said to be held compared to the other artistic
disciplines? The fact that cinema was being proposed as the reverse angle
of scientific disciplines such as sociology, anthropology and history
proper, whose vocation is also to illuminate historical processes, made
its introduction into the Collège de France all the harder.

The initial title of
the exhibition reflected this missed opportunity – collage/collège
– but also referred to ‘collage’ in the true sense, in particular to the
glue and scissors used by the filmmaker for his preparatory models. In
addition, it conveyed the dynamic interplay of images confronted with
one another, notably those not destined a priori to be linked,
juxtaposed, or compared. I thought at this moment of the great master
Robert Bresson: ‘Bring together things that have not yet been brought
together and did not seem predisposed to be so.’ (4)

Jean-Luc Godard’s collaboration
with a museum comes at a point in his œuvre when his work is not reaching
the size of audience enjoyed by his early films, whilst his name has never
been so frequently evoked and celebrated. This apparent contradiction
can be partly explained by the fact that the combination within a single
film of a critical dimension and a capacity for entertainment has become
less and less accepted. À bout de souffle (1960), Le
Mépris (1963) and Pierrot le fou (1965) achieved a perfect
blend of theoretical power and spectacular lyricism. After classical cinema,
so heavily dominated by Hollywoodian continuity editing and set design,
underwent a decisive reappraisal in the 1960s – one emblematic of modern
cinema – this combination of criticism and spectacle in turn experienced
a comparable crisis at the beginning of the 1990s.

2 – During the 1990s,
Godard was invited on several occasions to conceive an exhibition or,
more loosely, to work within the space of a museum. Consciously or not,
the project he conceived in 2005 and 2006 entertains certain distant relations
with the museum created by Henri Langlois in the 1970s at the Palais de
Chaillot, which deployed the same technique of the juxtaposition of the
material evidence and ephemeral memories of cinema. Langlois freely combined
real film objects (cameras, props, costumes), traces of the economic and
mediatised reality of cinema (photos, posters, contracts), the evidence
of filmmaking (scenarios, storyboards, scale models) and lyrical and nostalgic
representations (frame enlargements, reduced-scale reproductions of sets,
fantastic scenographies) ... Such elements doubtless explained the principle
of reproduction at work at the heart of both the Musée du
Cinéma Henri Langlois and Collage(s) de France.

In the latter, the
duplicated pictorial artworks, press photos and literary extracts were
all tied to this same principle of reproduction. By deploying this
as a yardstick, or as a sort of common denominator – one derived from
the act of exhibiting cinema itself – cinema is pitted against other types
of image production in a way that leads in turn to an interrogation of
the very functioning of its exhibition.

5. Maurice Denis,
Théories, 1890-1910: Du symbolisme et de Gauguin vers un nouvel
ordre classique (Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Occident, 1912).
The word used for ‘durations’ in the French original here is ‘durées’,
a term and notion central to Bergson’s conception of time, and to Deleuze’s
development thereof in his philosophy of cinema.

6. Bresson, p. 51.
We recall that Bresson uses the word ‘cinematograph’ to describe the practice
of cinema as ambitious, exploratory artform, reserving the term ‘CINEMA’,
usually in capital letters, for conventional fare.

3 – The novelty of
this exhibition project lay partly in its environmental aspect, which
might at first sight have recalled the type of film set usually constructed
in a studio. The filmmaker had already experimented with such sets in
Passion (1982), but in Collage(s) de France it was a question
of something quite different. Space was used to describe a temporal process,
that of thought itself. The visitor was invited, through his or
her wanderings, to reflect on cinematic time as matter, the visual embodiment
of thought in film. By walking, he or she would progressively discover
the process of cinematic conception: just as Maurice Denis talked of painting
as an ordered arrangement of colours, a film is a specific arrangement
of durations. (5) The visitor therefore completed the journey
of the exhibiting filmmaker in reverse: while the latter conceives with
a view to rendering visible and audible, the role of the visitor was to
look and listen with a view to reconstituting the activity of conception.
This explains the titles given to each of the rooms: Mythe (Allegory),
Humanity (The Image), The Camera (Metaphor), The Film(s) (Duty(s)), Alliance
(The Unconscious, Totem, Taboo), The Bastards (Parable), The Real (Daydream),
Murder (Sesame, Theorem, Montage) and The Tomb (Fable). However the rooms
were not ordered didactically so as to reconstitute the process of creating
a film. The visitor was faced with a sort of vast puzzle which had to
be mentally organised.

Collage(s) de France
was therefore a theoretical environment designed for an 1100 square
metre exhibition space in which images and words were mixed together and
juxtaposed. A few original artworks chosen by the filmmaker were included
alongside numerous reproductions, duplications and re-creations. Here
is old master Bresson again: ‘The mix of truth and falsity produces falsity
(photographed theatre or cinema). Falsity, when homogenous, can produce
truth (theatre).’ (6) It is not without a certain theoretical irony that
the filmmaker most attached to challenging theatrical clichés in
post-war cinema should have been proposing to the museum visitor an experience
not completely without theatricality. But in fact the effect was quite
different: the proposed exhibition was a maze in which the author of Histoire(s)
du cinéma (1988-1998) achieved scenographically what he had
hitherto accomplished through montage. Rather than the images, it was
now the visitors who filed past. And let us recall that procession is
one of the ways in which the human body had already figured in several
films, including Grandeur et décadence d’un petit commerce de
cinéma (1985), For Ever Mozart (1996) and the mysterious
On s’est tous défilé (1987) ...

In fact the visitor
was invited to experience the time of a film’s conception in a new way:
the time of ‘materialisation’ (to use JLG’s words), the time that passes
between the phases of imagining and making, before arriving at the condensed
time of the finished work, which is then painfully separated from its
maker and swallowed up into the tomb of distribution and communication.

4 – In the 1960s, at
the time of the birth of the New Wave, the street was the principal set
and opened up a new visual field; filmmakers were free to shoot using
hand-held cameras, and scripts were liberated from strict narrative obligations,
resulting in lots of dialogue for comparatively little story.

In the 1970s, after
the period of video activity with Sonimage, which succeeded the collaborative
Groupe Dziga Vertov venture, both of which were predominantly experimental
in nature, the environment was no longer either pastoral or urban, as
if the experience of the street during the events of May 68 had exhausted
JLG the flâneur. With the decisive collaboration of Anne-Marie
Miéville, it was now created through the manipulation of the video
image in films such as Numéro deux (1975) and lengthy series
such as France tour détour deux enfants (1979). Here the
environment stemmed from thought articulated graphically. During this
period, the screen was used for a sort of mise en page, where screens
multiplied within the screen and writing became even more central to the
image. From the beginning of the œuvre, typed or cursive writing has frequently
taken the place of filmed reality, the arbitrary signs of language filling
the entire screen. The détournement of shop-signs, newspaper
headlines and posters on buildings, for instance, has consistently conveyed
this strong interest in written language. The credit sequences too were
always composed in remarkable ways. One should also doubtless recall Godard’s
interest in the Soviet filmmakers, the formal strength of whose imagery
was as much a question of overall graphic effect as of realistic or historical
reconstruction.

The 1980s is the decade
in which there emerges in Godard’s work a greater concern for ‘sets’ in
the conventional sense, and where painting and choreography also meet,
for instance in the recreations of the great paintings and actors’ gesticulations
in Passion (notably those of Michel Piccoli and Isabelle Hupert).
Indeed agitated corporeal movement is central to the films of this period
(Prénom: Carmen, 1983; Détective, 1985; King
Lear, 1987), as if the characters’ hysterical impulses were simultaneously
clashing and merging with the key characteristic of the shots: their pictoriality.
Disturbed by the movement of the actors and by montage, the paintings
recreated as film sets became stages in the process of thought.

One should also note,
from the 1980s to the present, those films that use ‘found sites’. In
keeping with the borrowed extracts of symphonic music, these sites are
strongly marked by a rather grandiose architectural quality, from the
interiors of large hotels (Détective) to the destroyed Sarajevo
library (Notre musique, 2004). Such locations, including the most
monumental ones, give the impression of having been constructed for the
purposes of the films.

Music, the depth of
the sound track (overlapping music, noise superimposition, layered ambient
sound) and high sound levels accentuated this sense of monumentality.
Sometimes sound provided overarching spatial unity: at the time of Nouvelle
Vague (1990), for instance, as well as in Histoire(s) du cinéma,
the screech of a crow or raven recurred insistently. This cry gave the
impression of being a mark of ownership stamped on the decor, a sonic
signature that sealed the image. In graphic terms this auditory rent of
a black bird, bordering on the unpleasant, was reminiscent of the sound
of a black felt-tip pen being used. (We recall that the filmmaker has
often worked with felt-tips for the title cards in his films.) The use
of bird noise should be seen, therefore, as a way of appropriating and
signing an existing environment.

By contrast, Collage(s)
de France absorbed the world into its space. Past and present were
swept together to form a journey: the traces and evidence piled up, came
together, were attracted to one another, and clung together in a furious
clash of images. Here it was no longer a question of capturing an environment
on film, but of the environment flooding into the exhibition in concentrated
form. This exhibition was realised in its ideal form in the various models.

8. The expression
used here in French is ‘effet-dispositif’. Often translated in a cinematic
context as ‘apparatus’, the term ‘dispositif’ designates the totality
of a given work’s signifying components, the manner in which these are
arranged, and the relationship established though such arrangement with
the viewer-listener-visitor.

Successive scale models
of the exhibition were made to finalise the thinking and distil the meaning.
Aesthetically the result was far from gratuitous; on the contrary, it
introduced a blaze into the institutional space of the museum: where the
various elements might be able to exist together at a distance in the
outside world, here they caught alight as a result of their proximity
to one another, and of the friction between the pasted documents.
Furthermore, it is possible that the filmmaker-turned-architect would
have come to fear full-scale construction of his models, and been tempted
to claim less and less responsibility for them as they reached their full
proportions (‘archaeology of cinema according to JLG’ ...). One
can understand Godard’s apparent fondness for Pierre Reverdy’s poetic
reflection cited in JLG/JLG: Autoportait de décembre (1995)
and elsewhere: ‘The image is a pure creation of the spirit. It cannot
be born of a comparison, but of the bringing together of two more or less
distant realities. The more distant and just the relationship between
these two realities that are brought together, the stronger the image
will be – and the more emotional power and poetic reality it will have.
Two realities with no relationship between them cannot be usefully brought
together. [...] An image is not strong because it is brutal or
fantastic – but because the association of ideas is distant and
just.’ (7)

5 – Even if it does
not interest him, Jean-Luc Godard’s proposal cannot be appreciated without
reference to a phenomenon that has left its mark on the milieu since the
1970s: installation art, ally and rival of the traditional artistic
disciplines. The conventional approach to exhibition, exemplified by the
display of pictures in rows on gallery walls, has been thrown into crisis,
or at least perturbed, by propositions where light no longer occupies
its mythically zenithal position. With the disappearance of all hierarchy
between walls and floor, the spectator has been invited to explore the
entire room. Installations are frequently characterised by their use of
‘found’ everyday materials on which museums confer artistic status. Another
defining feature is the presence of moving images: just as the beams of
light have complicated the traditional museum visit, so the use of projected
moving images has further disorientated the visitor.

With its reproductions
of found images, moving or not, the principles of installation art were
all present in Godard’s project. But he was suspicious of ‘installation-effects’,
which in his view come too close to mere curiosity for the little machines
on display. (8) Neither artistic ‘celibacy’ nor ‘desiring machines’
attract him. It was doubtless with a view to minimising the installation-effect
that he appeared to foreground the environmental aspect. The invitation
to let one’s attention wander was also an incitement to visitors to lose
themselves, and diverted attention away from the machines required for
the projection of the images. And here the exhibition rejoined cinema,
where ‘everything is done’ in the theatre, in the interests of the existence
of the fictional characters, to make the viewer forget where the images
come from.

In the past the filmmaker
has devoted considerable attention to reflecting on the conditions of
a film’s production by disrupting spectatorial investment through techniques
such as narrative rupture, looks to camera, interrupted music, non-linearity
of events and so on. He has also frequently represented the cinematic
‘machine’ and deprived the viewer of illusion, while nonetheless retaining
a certain lyricism. Similarly, the sudden breaks to which he subjects
his borrowed musical extracts serve to defer, if not prevent, the formation
of his characters.

More than ever before,
perhaps, Collage(s) de France offered a complete fusion of a work
and what had governed its conception.

6 – From the outset
this exhibition project was essentially a moral essay. But its environmental
aspect simultaneously produced the effects of a fiction in which the central
character was JLG himself. Or, more precisely, his thought in motion,
organised into the shape of an exhibition. In a way it recalled Eisenstein’s
dream of filming Marx’s Capital: the mise en scène
of a kind of theorem ...

Collage(s) de France
invited the visitor to embark on an intimate voyage, albeit one permeated
by the upheavals of the world. It is the tension between these two poles
– autobiographical fiction / investigation – that generated the poetry.
A poet such as Victor Hugo combined in his work intimate writing, politics
and moral essay. Les Châtiments, for example, is a poetic
gesture in which this tension between ‘autofiction’ and critique of the
world is played out. It therefore comes as little surprise that Hugo’s
texts should punctuate the voice-off commentaries and dialogue of several
Godard films, including Passion, For Ever Mozart and La
Monnaie de l’absolu, episode 3A of Histoire(s) du cinéma,
which expresses outrage at the war in Yugoslavia ...

10. The expression
used here in the French, ‘faire ses devoirs’, means both ‘do their duty’
and ‘do their homework’.

Collage(s) de France
was a response to something for which the filmmaker had often been reproached:
not telling a story. One day he jokingly recalled how he used to be reprimanded
as a child (‘Don’t tell stories’) (9), whereas in his work as a filmmaker
he is now asked by producers to tell them. In fact he has always sought
a balance between fiction and ethical gesture. In his work, Goethe’s Werther
clashes with Mallarmé’s Igitur, David’s political touch
with Duchamp’s scrupulous nominalism. In tackling the exhibition, the
filmmaker was telling a story in which the spectators were the fictional
characters, or the frames on a strip of celluloid where the latter represents
the proposed route through the gallery. This project extended the thinking
of Histoire(s) du cinéma, which had already taken history
in the direction of poetry and of the essay.

7 – Each room was conceived
with the aim of encouraging viewers to construct their own collages from
the forest of images. Visitors were therefore put to work and called on
to participate in the activity of assemblage, to do their ‘duty’ in the
exhibition (as the title of one of the rooms puts it). (10)

Collage(s) de France
was a utopia unrealisable on film. This utopia maintained a volatile balance
between fiction and aesthetic and ethical judgement, between belief and
delivery of a lesson. This utopian cinematic possibility was cinema transformed
into thought.

We recall that JLG
has always been interested in what is divided. In the first room, for
example, was written ‘Hollywood, the Mecca of cinema’. Hollywood was thus
located on the side of belief, confronting a documentary image of an Algerian
family on the wall opposite.

Fiction is fuelled
by belief, documentary by evidence. Out of this division emerges the theme
of the filmmaker split between the project and the result, conception
and perception, the exception and the rule ... the film and cinema. In
different ways, Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1979), Prénom:
Carmen (1983), Soigne ta droite (1987) and Éloge
de l’amour (2001) all told the story of this division, and the exhibition
became the utopian place of refuge where it might be resolved. But the
director of Le Mépris and Passion also put himself
in danger in this refuge: by entering the museum, did he remain a filmmaker?
Did cinema exist without films?

8 – In fact the division
lay elsewhere. On the one hand the world of cinema, unconcerned by the
fact that the filmmaker was conceiving an exhibition, and on the other
the world of museums, embarrassed by the notion and use of reproduction,
as much from an economic, aesthetic and moral viewpoint. This exhibition
introduced reproduction into a place whose calling is to exhibit non-reproducible
originals, a place founded on authenticity and inalienability. Whereas
what Godard wanted to exhibit was devoid of all value. Paradoxically,
therefore, it was by using reproduction that he entered the museum world.

In fact he has long
been located on an island between the worlds of the museum and of cinema,
where he has incarnated the tension in the relationship between cinema
and the other arts. The exhibition project registered this tension by
displaying the ontological basis of cinema – reproduction – on the walls
of a museum: a film is a recorded copy of reality; it is also the copy
of a negative, and is distributed thanks to the duplication of copies.
Every aspect of cinematic art is determined by the fact of reproduction.
Collage(s) de France was therefore an exhibition of the every essence
of cinema. Since reproduction manifests itself through enlargement, reduction
and change of format, processes such as photography, image transfer, video
and photocopying were all used. So the filmmaker enlarged, reduced and
divided. In other words he performed the work of an art historian: he
scrutinised, but remained an editor in his approach to cutting
things up and reassembling them differently. This is what reproduction
makes possible.

If we consider modern
art, especially contemporary art of the past forty years, as a sort of
generalised process of recycling (Pablo Picasso and his collages, Marcel
Duchamp and his readymades ...), Jean-Luc Godard proposed a new and exemplary
illustration of the same method in his films by way of a generalised art
of quotation. If he once dreamt of making a film in which everything would
be borrowed from elsewhere, Collage(s) de France was perhaps the
realisation of that dream.

This experimentation
with the exhibition of reproduction in a museum could prove just as shocking
as it has in cinema, where Godard gave such a strong impression of only
imitating and criticising. His art of re-use has generally been
linked to his origins as a critic, but his exhibition model reveals today
what has actually been at stake in it for him.

By ‘exhibiting’, he
is close to André Malraux and his imaginary museum in which, thanks
to reproduction, artworks could be brought together and compared. In other
words, simply seen.